Gratitude Honestly Makes Life Better!
We live in tough times. Life can be a struggle for many, whether it's living through the northern hemisphere floods and fires or just making ends meet in this cost-of-living crisis but we can feel energised through the power of gratitude. If we surrender ourselves to honesty, vulnerability and gratitude we will be set free from all the worry and anxiety of everyday life.
Gratitude is a potent tool for bringing ourselves back from negative emotions like fear, anger and self-pity. In almost any situation, we can find something - even if it's the tiniest thing - to be grateful for.
Gratitude helps us realise our life position depends on the help of others. It makes us realise that we are not infallible. When we live gratefully and practice 'deep gratitude' we will see all the good things that we are grateful for. The morning sun, the roof over our heads, our health and our friends and family.
In addition to focusing on the good things that we have, we can also feel grateful for the bad experiences by thinking about what we're getting from that experience, and how each experience, each challenge makes us stronger, and how we can make things better for ourselves and others.
Once we are honest with ourselves, realising how fortunate we are, it will help us to be more honest with others. Looking at the world through a grateful lens will make us kinder, always looking for the ways we can help others and we can use the power of gratitude to encourage and support others to live their best lives too!
Gratitude helps us to live in the moment and emboldens us to overcome the challenges that we face! When we live gratefully, we turn every challenge into an opportunity to be even better individuals. Every ordeal can be turned into a positive, even if it is just the lesson we learned from dealing with the crisis.
Living gratefully or practicing 'deep gratitude' will make us prioritise our physical, mental and social health.
Honesty and integrity are the behaviour we most want to see in the world around us. In our relationships and teams, gratitude helps us to see more of it!
It influences how we behave. The decisions we make on how we behave are central to how we interact with those around us. How we engage with our environment depends on how we see it. When we practice gratitude that perspective will always be a positive one!
How we interpret our environment depends on those relationships with a number of complex factors that are constantly changing. We keep searching for constants in a world of change. And we use gratitude to search for truth and build relationships based on these core values of honesty and integrity.
We enhance a culture of gratitude so that we allow honesty and integrity to shine, and we listen more intently to feedback. This creates a virtuous circle in three clear steps: Firstly, we build and practice the behaviour we expect from others by displaying those qualities ourselves. By being grateful, we encourage more kindness and positivity in our own behavior and that has a ripple effect on those around us!
A big part of being grateful is listening with purpose. We listen to the feedback from others because we would offer positive, supportive feedback to them.
Finally, we take that feedback on board; we can then evaluate and adjust our behavioural patterns, and become kinder, grateful and more positive individuals, and we go again!
Through gratitude we can become more honest with ourselves and this in turn will strengthen our relationships with others and make our whole world a more positive place.
Many thanks to JJ Harrison for the amazing sunrise picture from Tasmania. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/